XXIV

OF THE GREEKS; OF THEIR ANCIENT DELUGES; OF THEIR ALPHABET, AND THEIR GENIUS

GREECE IS a small hilly country, intersected by the sea, of much the same extent as Great Britain. Everything in this country testifies the physical revolutions it has undergone. The islands which surround it sufficiently show, by the continued shoals near their shores, by the shallowness of the sea, by the herbs and roots which grow under the water, that they were detached from the continent. The gulfs of Eubius, Calcis, Argos, Corinth, Actium, and Messina, demonstrate that the sea has made passages through the earth. The sea-shell beds, with which are covered those mountains that surround the famous vale of Tempe, are ocular proofs of an ancient inundation: and the deluges of Ogiges and Deucalion, which have produced so many fables, are historically true. This may probably be the reason why the Greeks are so new a people. These great revolutions sunk them once more in barbarity, at the time that the nations of Asia and Egypt were flourishing.

I shall leave to men more learned than myself, the trouble of proving that the three children of Noah, who were the only inhabitants of the globe, divided the whole of it amongst them; that they separated from each other two or three thousand leagues, laying every where the foundation of powerful empires; and that Javan, his grandson, peopled all Greece, in passing through Italy; that from thence the Greeks derived the name of Ionians, Ion having detached colonies upon the coasts of Asia Minor; that Ion plainly appears to be Javan, by changing the S into Sa, and the on into van. Such tales are told to children, and children do not believe them:

Nec pueri credunt nisi qui nondum aere lavantur.

The deluge of Ogiges is usually placed about twelve hundred years before the first olympiad: the first who speaks of it is Acesitas, quoted by Eusebius, in his Evangelical Preparation, and by George le Sincelle. Greece, it is said, remained a desert two hundred years after the sea had made this eruption into the country. It is, nevertheless, asserted, that a government was at the same time established in Si-ciones and in Argos; the names of the first magistrates of these little provinces are even mentioned, and they are called Basiloi, which answers to princes. But let us not lose time in penetrating these useless obscurities.

There was another inundation in the time of Deucalion, the son of Prometheus. The fable adds that there remained no other inhabitants than Deucalion and Pyrrha, who made fresh men, by throwing stones behind them, through their legs. The world is stocked with men faster than a warren is with rabbits.

If very judicious men, like Petau the Jesuit, is to be believed, a single son of Noah produced a race, which, at the end of twenty-eight years, amounted to six hundred and twenty-three thousand millions, six hundred and twelve millions of men. The calculation is a little high. We are so unhappy at present, that in twenty-six marriages, there are usually but four which produce children that become fathers. This calculation is formed upon the accounts of the registers of the greatest cities. Of a thousand children that are born the same year, there are scarce six hundred remaining at the end of twenty years. Let us suspect the veracity of Petau, and such, who like him, create children with the stroke of a pen, as well as those who relate that Deucalion and Pyrrha peopled Greece by throwing stones.

Greece, we know, was the country of fables, and almost every fable was the origin of a doctrine, of a temple, and a public feast. By what excess of madness, by what absurd obstinacy, have so many compilers endeavored to prove, in so many enormous volumes, that a public feast, established in commemoration of an event, is a demonstration of the truth of that event? What, because young Bacchus is celebrated in a temple issuing from Jupiter’s thigh, Jupiter really had concealed Bacchus in his thigh? What, Cadmus and his wife were changed into serpents, in Boeotia, because the Boeotians commemorated such an event in their ceremonies! Did the temples of Castor and Pollux, at Rome, demonstrate that those gods descended upon earth, in favor of the Romans?

Much rather assure yourself, when you see an ancient feast, or an antique temple, that they are the works of error. This error gains credit at the end of two or three centuries; it afterwards becomes sacred, and temples are erected to chimeras.

On the contrary, in historical times, the most noble truths have but few sectaries; the greatest men die without honor. The Themistocleses, the Cimons, the Miltiadeses, the Aris-tideses, the Phocions, are persecuted; whilst Perseus, Bacchus, and other fanatical personages, have temples.

Credit may be given to a people with regard to what they say of themselves to their own disadvantage, when these accounts are attended with probability, and are no way contradictory to the common order of nature.

The Athenians, who were dispersed in a very barren land, inform us themselves, that an Eyyptian, named Cyclops, who was driven out of his country, gave them their first institutions. This appears surprising, because the Egyptians were not navigators; but it might have happened that the Phoenicians, who travelled throughout all nations, carried Cyclops into Attica. It is very certain, that the Greeks did not adopt the Egyptian letters, which heirs no way resemble. The Phoenicians carried them their first alphabet, which then consisted of only sixteen characters, and are evidently the same. The Phoenicians afterwards added eight letters, which the Greeks still retain.

I look upon an alphabet as an incontestible monument of the country from whence a nation derived its first knowledge. It appears very probable, again, that these Phoenicians discovered the silver mines, which were in Attica, as they worked those of Spain. Merchants were the first preceptors of these same Greeks, who afterwards instructed all other nations.

These people, all barbarous as they were in the time of Ogiges, seem to have been born with organs more favorable to the fine arts, than any other people. They had something in their nature more cunning and subtle: their language evinces it; for even before they knew how to write, we find that they had a more harmonious mixture of soft consonants and vowels in their language, than any other people of Asia were ever acquainted with.

The name of Knath, which signifies the Phoenicians, according to Sanchoniatho, is certainly not so harmonious as that of Hellenos or Graios. Argos, Athens, Lacedemon, and Olympus, sound better to the ear than the city of Reheboth. Sophia, wisdom, is softer than Shochemath in Syriac and Basileus in Hebrew. Roy sounds better than Melk or Shack. Compare the names of Agamemnon, Diomede, Idomeneus, with those of Mardokempad, Simordak, Sohasduch, Niricassolahssar. Joseph himself, in his book against Appion, acknowledges that the Greeks could not pronounce the barbarous name of Jerusalem, because the Jews pronounced it Hershalaïm: this word grated the throat of an Athenian; and it was changed by the Greeks from Hershalaïm to Jerusalem.

The Greeks transformed all the harsh Syriac, Persian, and Egyptian names. Of Coresh they made Cyrus; of Isheth and Oshireth, they made Isis and Osiris; of Moph, they made Memphis, and at length brought the Barbarians to accustom themselves to their pronunciation; so that in the time of the Ptolemies, the Egyptian cities and gods had no other than Grecian names.

The Indus and Ganges had their names from the Greeks. The Ganges, in the Bramins’ language, was called Sannoubi, and the Indus Sombadipo. Such are the ancient names that we find in the Vedam.

The Greeks, in extending themselves upon the coasts of Asia Minor, carried with them their harmony. Their Homer was probably born at Smyrna.

Fine architecture, perfect sculpture, painting, and good music, real poetry, real eloquence, the method of writing good history, and, in a word, philosophy, though unfashioned and obscure; all these things were handed down to other nations by the Greeks. The last comers surpassed their masters in everything.

Egypt had never any fine statues by Grecian hands. Ancient Balbec in Syria, ancient Palmyra in Arabia, had not those regular magnificent palaces and temples, till the sovereigns of those countries called in Grecian artists. We find nothing but the remains of barbarism, as has been in another place observed, in the ruins of Persepolis, built by the Persians; and the monuments of Balbec and Palmyra are still, under their ruins, master-pieces of architecture.